The World of Scott Mindeaux

Macworld Day 3

I had a weird night last night so getting up this morning was a bit hard. I’m not going to get into it.

First let me get this off my chest. To the guy eating his late lunch in the session, please don’t choose to eat FISH in the class. It smells in here. You obviously didn’t buy your lunch here at the conference. To the guy to the right of me…stop fiddling with your bag of chips, it makes alot of noise. You’re trying to be discreet that you can’t open your bag, so stop trying. Oh good, you got it. Now, stop playing with your empty bag, its distracting. Ugh.

Today was the following classes:

• Administering Macs in Exchange 2003/2007 and 2010
• Demystifying Digital Asset Managment
• Adobe CS Administration

In addition, the expo show floor opened. I was pleasantly surprised to find lines of people lined up for their badges to get into the show. What was disappointing was the show floor unfortunately. Now the show flow was crowded, but it was because everyone was squeezed in. This year only the North Hall was sused and even the entire hall wasn’t used. The aisles were full of people looking at new software, but not seeing the big hitters like Apple, Quark and Adobe it seemed to be sparse. I walked the floor and had to get out. I started to feel anxious and trapped and had to get out in the open. It was weird.

Fellow blogger, Rebel Price, aka Jeff Tabaco was at the show at the same time and we had missed each other by feet it seems. He has posted pics on Facebook and I saw that and saw that we missed each other on the floor.

Tomorrow I will be in classes all day. Happy Friday.

p.s. to everyone out there…it is Macworld, not MacWorld or Mac-World or Mac World. It’s amazing how many don’t spell it right on their materials. Amazing.

Macworld Day 1 and 2

So after the last two days of Intro to Final Cut Studio, I’m convinced that Final Cut Pro Engineers make way more money than me. I had alot of fun in this class. Now for those following my Facebook page know that initially I said I took the wrong class. This was Intro to Final Cut Studio, the class I SHOULD have taken was Final Cut Pro In-Depth. The key word here was Studio vs. Pro.  The class I ended up in focused on the other apps that are part of the Final Cut Studio: Motion, Soundtrack Pro, LiveType and DVD Studio.

Mark Spencer an authority on Final Cut focused mainly on Motion and Soundtrack Pro. Our users like to use After Effects and Cinema 4D for alot of graphics, but now I see the advantages of doing it in MOtion instead. Mark recently told us that he met wiht a bunch of animators at ABC 7 in Los Angeles and many of the animation sequences for opening of shows was done in After Effects, now its all done in Motion. The integration with Final Cut was the key.

One of the kewlest thing I learned was how to take a Photoshop file with layers and turn it into a “video” and give this flat file a 3D look. Think the Bravo commercials on TV where they show the website and then the camera dollies thru it and the items on the page  are in 3D and you fly past them.

The rest of week will be in the MacIT track and will also be attending a 1 day seminar on the Symiystification of Social Media and Web 2.0.

The expo part of the conference starts tomorrow as well and that will be in the North Hall. According to a press release, they have attendance levels that surpass 2009′s attendance. Hmmm…not sure…

28 hours and counting…

Good morning everyone.

Well the rain has left Southern California and the sun is shining and the sky is blue with big white puffy clouds.

I woke up a bit groggy this morning, but got myself out of bed and started to pack for my trip to San Francisco tomorrow. I’m leaving for SF to attend Macworld and get in 5 days of training. This is no vacation! I’ll be in classes from Tuesday to Saturday. Here is my tentative schedule so far:

TUESDAY, Feb 9  & WEDNESDAY, Feb 10
10:00 am to 5:00 pm
In-Depth Final Cut Studio or AppleScripting

THURSDAY, Feb 11
1:00 pm to 2:15 pm
Demystifying Digital Asset Management

2:30 pm to 4:00 pm
Adobe CS Administration

4:30 pm to 6:00 pm
Administering Macs in Exchange 2007

FRIDAY, Feb 12
10:30 am to 12:00 pm
Mastering OS X Administration

1:00 pm to 2:30 pm
Scripting for Deployment and Sys Administration

3:30 pm to 5:00 pm
Advanced Integration with Final Cut Server or Enterprise Level Scripting

SATURDAY, Feb 13
10:00 am to 11:30 am
Installer packages for Admins

12:30 pm to 2:00 pm
System Image Creation and Deployment

2:30 pm to 4:00 pm
Advanced Apple Remote Desktop or How to survive an IT Audit
or
Deploying iPhone, iPad in an Enterprise environment

It will be a bit of a wet week up in SF. We have rain forecasted for Monday night thru most of Tuesday and then again on Thursday to Friday. Temps will hold in the mid 50′s all week with nighttime lows in the mid 40s.

I also want to get in some foodie-time while I”m here so today I need to scope out some restaurants. A dear former co-worker of mine, Kimberley Davis is back in SF so I have plans to meet up with her this week as well. Kimberley and I worked together at Sur La Table corporate. Also in town are friends Michael, Mauricio and Brett. Brent (aka Larry from the Little Fatty Cast) will also be attending Macworld and will be there for the week. He is actually there today cheering on a friend of his in the Kaiser Permanente SF Half Marathon and 5k Fun Run.

I have quite a bit of packing to do and I still need to get into the office to do a few things before I can leave.

See you guys in San Fran!

Clouds over Macworld

Well I have been tracking the weather for next week. I’ll be in San Francisco for the week and hoping I won’t have to drudge thru the conference in rain gear. Now one weather site claims for cloudy to partly-sunny conditions for the week. However another site says showers likely for most of that week.

Now I know that predicting weather is not exact, but can’t two major weather sites on the internet get it right or at least be close? The two sites I use on a regular basis are Accuweather.com and Weather.com.  I also frequent the NOAA website.

I’m staying within a few blocks of Moscone, but not having to deal with rain would be nice. We have another rain event heading for Southern California on thrusday thru Friday. I’m sure it won’t be the torrential/epic rains that were cited a few weeks back, but we’re expecting up to 1″ in the OC and up to 2″ along the Saddleback mountains.

Missing Macworld This Year

This is probably the first time in several years that I will be missing the Macworld conference. Today’s announcements in the keynote address were kinda yawners, but I am looking forward to some of the new features in iMovie and iPhoto. 

The new 17″ Macbook Pro is kewl too, but don’t think I’ll be in the market for one until the economy sweetens up a bit. It’s only Tuesday, let’s see what else happens this week as Macworld ends on Friday.

Axiotron has also released a ModBook Pro, the bigger brother of their original ModBook, but in a 15.4 form factor.

Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit announced today Mac integration with Office Live and Sharepoint and increased compatibility with Entourage and Exchange. Specifically the ability to sync notes and tasks.

Oh and there was one more announcement:

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

New TSA Regs at SFO

Goodbye SFO and goodbye Macworld 2008.

So I get to the airport in plenty of time.  Traffic wasn’t so bad on the freeway as it was just trying to get out of the city on local streets!

So I get ot the airport and everything is going well and get to the TSA checkpoint.  Turns out there is a new regulation that was enacted, apparently, just at SFO.  All electronics: iPods, Batteries, cords, flash drvies, phones, blackberry pdas, have to be removed from your bag and placed in the tray.  In addition, any fluids or gels must be declared and placed in a tray.  I basically had to dump the entire contents of my laptop bag into a tray. It took forever at the other end of the scanner to put everything back in its place.

I haven’t been able to find any documentation regarding this new change. There were NO new signage and I couldn’t find anything on the TSA or SFOAirport.com websites.